California's stem-cell initiative on hold

By most accounts, the CIRM has made significant progress on practically every front. It has filled out its governing board with some of the top scientists in the country and has held over five dozen public meetings to air concerns. Chief among those concerns have been ethical questions concerning the coercion of egg donors, the distribution of commercial benefits from newly discovered procedures, and disclosure about conflict of interest by board members.

"The CIRM has been subjected to an extraordinary amount of attention from public, press, and legislators and has responded with extraordinary openness through the past year," says R. Alta Charo, a law and bioethics professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She and others say the effect has been to create policies exceeding federal standards in some areas.

But plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued last week that lack of direct management by the state and control of taxpayer funds violates the state constitution. The plaintiffs are a Christian conservative group, the California Family Council, and a tax group, the National Tax Limitation Foundation, which is being supported by the Life Legal Defense Foundation in Napa.

"We think the state shouldn't have to pay for all this research and can't sustain it," says Dana Cody, executive director of Life Legal Defense. "That lack of sufficient oversight is what we are concerned about."

Defendants told the judge last week that the measure does meet state law about oversight, and they hold that the plaintiffs' motivation is not legal, but moral. "If you look at who is behind the suits, you will find they are fundamentally opposed to the research and are doing anything they can to stop it," says CIRM counsel James Harrison.

Besides the lawsuit, California's stem-cell foray has other serious critics, even among supporters.

"Unfortunately as drafted, Prop. 71 [goes] a little light in the area of public accountability.... The final product didn't have the safeguards it should have," said state Sen. Debra Ortiz last Friday in two symposiums. Ms. Ortiz has supported the measure from the outset but continues to express a laundry list of concerns she feels were not understood by the public when it approved the measure. She has been involved with a bill to codify reforms that is expected to be heard in the Assembly Health Committee next month.

In the meantime, several universities have been moving ahead with private donations. But national observers say the halt in research is enabling other states to close the gap on California's once-giant lead in stem-cell research.

Says Ms. Charo: "There has been a race among the states to copy California, and this could help the locus of activity to move away."

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